Recent advances in telecommunications technology have allowed a wide array of special telecommunication services to be made available to subscribers. Through the advent and acceptance of wireless communications (such as cellular telephony for instance) and Internet communications, it is now commonplace for a person to receive messages at virtually any location and any time of day. Though these messages are often sent by the subscriber's established personal or business concerns, they may also be sent by others—including those who wish to advertise products, services, or political or social opinions.
Moreover, senders may wish to access a subscriber's microbrowser application, which is in some sense a scaled-down version of a conventional web browser, to convey a greater range of content and options to a subscriber. The microbrowser typically employs a wireless markup language (WML), such as HDML (handheld device markup language) or WAP (wireless access protocol). In WML, information is conveyed to a microbrowser in the form of decks of “cards” from a WML server on a network, and individual cards are presented to a user. Often, a WML digest will be sent to the user containing decks of cards and/or images for presentation to a user. These cards are defined by a underlying code and are somewhat analogous to HTML pages now commonplace on the World Wide Web. However, each card is greatly scaled down and specialized to facilitate presentation to a user via a small display screen.
Furthermore, many senders may wish to send a variety of messages to a subscriber, and as a result, users may tend to be overwhelmed with incoming and outgoing messages of all sorts, such as short message service (SMS) messages, e-mail messages, voice mail messages, and the like. Senders trying to distinguish themselves may wish to present messages to a subscriber at certain times or on certain days.